Speech therapy has typically involved interactive real time adaptive human to human interaction. Similarly, much teaching and training has historically involved interactive real time adaptive human to human interactions. As computers, video systems, audio systems, and other technology have advanced, more and more of these technologies have been brought to bear on teaching and training. This patent application describes how certain technologies have been applied in speech therapy. Though the description focuses on speech therapy, one skilled in the art will appreciate the relevance to other applications including training.
Technology has been applied in related fields. For example, flight simulators (sims) have become increasingly sophisticated. These sims place a human in different scenarios and may be pre-constructed to evaluate responses to certain conditions. Sims may also be used to train pilots how to react to certain situations. Thus, sims represent a class of real time adaptive applications. Some sims may even accept physiological bio-feedback from pilots being trained. This bio-feedback may be employed for analysis and/or to customize a sim scenario on the fly. Physiological bio-feedback may be employed more frequently in athletic training sims.
While these sims have provided invaluable training on a broad scale, training that might not otherwise have been available, this training has typically been limited to interactions between humans (e.g., pilots) and machines (e.g., airplanes) operating in the physical world.